First let me say that I love my kids. More than anything else in this world, but of course I need a break from them every now and then. So after dropping my extremely overtired cranky daughter off at school I went to my friends house to drink my coffee and chatt while we were waiting for Ikea to open. I find myself thinking about something she said to me, "you've made this happy thing of yours very complicated". "Ok" I said "but that's because it is complicated, it's easy to fake it, but what I want is bigger than superficial happiness." We continued chatting along these lines for a while and then she suggested that I begin to list all the things that do make me happy.
Which when you first think about it makes complete sense, but then when I started to think about it more and more. I realized I would like to be in a situation where my perception of my world is mostly chock full of happy things. It's not that I only want external things to make me happy, it's that ultimately I want to be happy internally and perceive my situation and things that happen as awesome. Of course identifying external things that make me happy is a start and identifying those things makes sense as a stepping stone, to get used to understanding my own happy feelings; but it's just the beginning. I think internal happiness would mean a positive monologue in my head with far less drama and very little worries. I should also mention that I've been pestering my friends with this quest of mine and they are being really awesome (kudo's my friends, you know who you are :) Another point that that a friend brought up is that you don't need to worry about important stuff like finances, just think about them logically and proceed to the next item on the list.
So getting back to the bell kick. We made it to Ikea, and signed our boys up for the play room. Now I am not a dishonest person in the least, but I wasn't about to volunteer that fact that Luke has never been in the play room because he was always too short. And I sure as hell wasn't going to put him up against the ruler, just in case he was still to short, so I just signed him up and HE GOT IN!!!!!! Now I'm not sure I can explain the pure joy this brought me. And him too. (the last time we tried to get him in, he couldn't but all his friends did, poor guy cried with such anguish I was almost in tears).... That aside, Jen and I took our babies upstairs and actually walked around the store wheeling the babes in strollers (side note they aren't really babies but they are to us). I had to stop and grin like a kid in a candy store. I had the whole store in front of me, no chasing kids, no dealing with temper tantrums,and looking at the stuff that I actually wanted to look at... (oohhh it sounds so selfish doesn't it)...but it was pure joy and before I knew it I was prancing happily behind the stroller and did a bell kick. HAPPINESS is when you can dance in public my friends!!!!
These last two blog posts from you are my favourite. Do you see how these little things are making you happy?
ReplyDeleteHere is a blog on happiness: http://59seconds.wordpress.com/
It's written by a psychology professor to promote his self help book. It's all small things that that can make you happy. (this is where I originated the 5 grateful things idea). I like it because his stuff is based on experiments in psychology, unlike a lot of self help stuff which is based on what I would call spiritual gobbledygook.